Sometimes We Don’t Go Grocery Shopping

I was not prepared for success this week and boy did I pay for it yesterday.

Sunday was mine and Casey’s first anniversary (where did this year go?!) and we spent the rainy morning having our first-anniversary tradition – coffee and bagels and buying each other a new record for our collection. We had every intention of going to the grocery store afterward, but the Sunday lazys started to settle in and all we wanted to do was go home, relax and listen to our new records (yes, we have a record player and yes, it’s what Sundays were made for).

As the day progressed, I had less and less of a desire to go down to the grocery store and more and more of a desire to clean the apartment (I can’t help it… I’m in full-blown nesting mode!). In the back of my mind, I kept thinking, Cristina… you guys don’t have groceries for breakfast tomorrow or lunch – you should really go to the store today. But nesting and relaxing won over.

Fast forward to Monday morning. I woke up thinking… it’s all good, I can MacGyver my way through the day. Casey was going to the store and preparing us our anniversary dinner since we couldn’t have it on Sunday (he had a show). Well, was I wrong. Not only did I not have enough to really MacGyver my way out of this poor planning, I had ZERO desire to cook anything.

Enter grabbing something on the go and snacking instead of having a proper lunch. The whole day I was kind of exhausted. It was hard for me to get my energy where I needed it to be. Of course, it wasn’t… I was chasing snacks all day instead of eating anything of substance!

I’m not sure about you, but when I go without having my regularly scheduled meals or rather meals of nutrient substance, the crazy comes out. I get stressed WAY easier and feelings of overwhelm can quickly take the place of my normal happy gal ways.

Has this happened to you before? Have you let things get away from you and went for convenient, easy instead of planning and preparing in advance and then paid the price with bad moods and stress eating? {raises hand, reluctantly…}

Here’s the thing – you’re not alone. It happens. This is life. We’re not perfect. And this isn’t going to be a lesson on how you should batch cook food and make sure you get to the grocery store so you’re prepared. My guess is… you don’t need that lesson. What good is that after the fact other than to beat ourselves up?

OK, I decided to hang out with my husband and listen to records on our anniversary instead of hitting the grocery store. Ummm… totally worth it. Some might even say I made the right decision.

This isn’t about beating ourselves up or me wagging my nutritionist finger at you (or myself) about preparation is everything. This is about recovery.

How do we recover from these days without beating ourselves up and letting it spiral into the rest of the week?

Who cares that you ordered Chipotle for dinner with Uber Eats because you didn’t have anything in the house.

Breath, reboot, let go of perfection. Things didn’t go quite as you would have liked. It’s time to let it go and recover.

Take a moment to breathe, reboot, and let it go – order take out if you need to, grab lunch out of the office, whatever you need to do, meditate if you’re feeling stressed out, the idea is to get back to neutral.

Make a plan – what day can you go grocery shopping? If you can’t, can you order some groceries from Amazon Fresh or Instacart? The answer is typically, yes. If you really think about it – you can. Although it can feel like the week has gone to hell because Monday got thrown off course, but the truth is the week is just getting started. There’s always time. We just have to prioritize it.

Set realistic expectations – don’t buy a ton of groceries thinking you’ll be without food if you don’t clear your bank account. This isn’t the week to try to make that recipe you’ve been dying to try where you have a marinate the chicken for 48 hours. This is the week for simple, quick, easy to make meals.

Pick a few things and stick to that – don’t try to do a hard course correct. Sometimes when we feel like we screwed up, we feel this need to make up for it and be perfect. This is sometimes disastrous and can set us up for falling on our face. And it’s not because you suck, it’s because your expectations were too much. You’re probably not going to make every single meal for the rest of the week. But you can commit to making a few of your lunches and dinners for the week.